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FILM; Vigilante Vengeance, Hollywood's Response To Primal Fantasies

By DAVID EDELSTEIN

Published: February 10, 2002

THE Arnold Schwarzenegger revenge picture ''Collateral Damage,'' which opened on Friday, had its original release date in November postponed when Warner Brothers executives speculated that the sight of the hero's wife and young son being blown up by terrorists would be in poor taste.

That it would be in poor taste at any other time probably hadn't occurred to them -- and why should it have? ''Gladiator,'' which offered the spectacle of the hero's young son flattened by a chariot and strung up alongside his mother, was honored by Hollywood as the best picture of 2000. The same year, the hero of ''The Patriot'' wrapped himself in the American flag to impale or scalp the murderous Englishmen who had shot his unarmed young son.

It might turn out that, far from being traumatized by the horrors of ''Collateral Damage,'' audiences will find themselves reassured to see terrorist attacks on American soil framed in so familiar a way: as more grist for an endless stream of movies that use the murder of women and children to justify wanton vigilante retribution.

Since long before the terrorist attacks on the United States and the collective call for retribution, American cinema has teemed with scenarios of injury and vengeance. Shorn of spouses and offspring, forced to hug their guns for warmth, our mythic vigilantes reside in the multiplexes and the art houses, on the jingoist right and the bleeding-heart left. Their bile has not only percolated through movies (heaven help the director and screenwriter who leave a child-killer standing, even behind bars, or let him die from just one bullet) but is discernible in the culture as a whole. One can see the vigilante impulse in the rising tide of road-rage incidents, in the number of school-age children who regard themselves as righteous avengers and in the overwhelmingly pro-death-penalty polls.

As Richard Slotkin, author of an influential trilogy on the myth of the American frontier, points out, the vigilante label is wondrously malleable. Historically, vigilantism has been the almost exclusive province of the white male threatened by a multiracial, murderously parasitical underclass. (See ''Death Wish,'' a 1974 film in which Charles Bronson avidly guns down urban thugs after his wife is raped and murdered.) Now, as in ''A Time to Kill'' (1996), vigilantism is accessible to the African-American whose child has been violated by privileged whites. The recent remake of ''Shaft'' uses once-racist vigilante tricks to achieve its antiracist ends. It suggests that police brutality is worth cheering for if the brutal policeman is black.

''These stories are all driven by the premise that the only way to deal with this problem -- whatever the problem may be -- is through an act of violence,'' Mr. Slotkin says. ''The hero has to figure that out and then do it, while we in the audience learn why we have to consent to it. If the film is referencing a real world, then in a sense we're giving a license to kill in a real world.''

In the ads for ''Collateral Damage,'' someone tells Mr. Schwarzenegger, ''You can't take the law into your own hands.'' He responds, ''Thanks for your advice'' -- the last word kicking off a flurry of bone-crunching. The movie itself takes a slightly more circuitous route to its bloody retribution. Mr. Schwarzenegger plays -- in an awful irony -- a firefighter, Gordy Brewer, whose heroics make him late picking up his beloved wife and son from an urban plaza. They're smiling and waving to him -- ''It's Dad! He's here! Dad! Hey, Dad!'' -- when a bogus policeman presses a button that blows them off the face of the earth.

The bad guy turns out to be a Colombian terrorist (''El Lobo'') who calls the bombing ''an act of self-defense against the American war criminals.'' Because the vigilante genre preys on mistrust of government along with fear of aliens, the Secretary of State, a woman, awkwardly informs Gordy that ''justice'' for his wife and son comes second to political ties with Colombia. The ''system'' once again abandons the little guy -- even the little guy with massive pectorals.

Mr. Schwarzenegger does not cut an inconspicuous figure, which makes Gordy's plan to slip into Colombia and quietly hunt down El Lobo a source of unintentional hilarity. But ''Collateral Damage'' has an ingenious twist up its sleeve. Civilized, compassionate, unable to inflict the same kind of ''collateral damage'' as his savage antagonist, Gordy inadvertently gives the terrorists their clearest shot at the C.I.A.'s inner sanctum. And so ''Collateral Damage'' ends up making a smashing and timely case for reconciling oneself to the deaths of so-called ''innocent'' civilians. The audience doesn't come fully alive until the hero descends to the barbarous level of his enemy, killing with the same abandon.

''Collateral Damage'' is vigilantism of a basic, red-meat variety. On the other end of the political (but not aesthetic) spectrum, Hollywood, on Friday, will deliver a gentler vigilante in ''John Q'': Denzel Washington as the father of a bright-eyed boy who will die without a heart transplant for which the family's insurance company has refused to pay. As the child's heart rate drops and the light in his eyes fades, the hospital administrator (a brittle Anne Heche) folds her arms and says the matter is out of her hands, the head cardiologist (James Woods) nervously attempts to excuse himself, and the mother (Kimberly Elise) weeps for her husband to ''do something.'' The sequence is so intense that at one screening, when the hitherto reasonable father finally jabbed a gun into the doctor's back, the audience screamed and pounded on the seats. ''The hospital's under new management now!'' he cries. ''Free health care for everyone!''

You can see the appeal. Is there anyone alive who wouldn't, on some level, want Denzel Washington and his gun negotiating with his or her health-care provider?